When I started making the video today about the iPhone lines, I wanted to find both people that were upgrading from an existing iPhone and people that were getting their first iPhone. I thought it would be hard to find the later. I mean, if you find it worthwhile to wait in line for an iPhone, wouldn’t you have already had one 6 months or a year ago? Shouldn’t the line people be the early adopters?
But no, the opposite was true, I had to try really hard to find someone who had an iPhone already. Most of the people, inclusing those at the front of the line, were buying their first iPhone. So that meant that of the 500 or so people that waited in line all day last year, perhaps only a handful came back for another line. At the same time, Apple did a good job of hyping this launch, to get the new users onboard.
A geekier reason may have been that iPhone 2007 users may have wanted to wait to update their old iPhones to the 2.0 OS before they deactivated. That was my only hesitation on buying a new iPhone right away.
Update: Cali and Neal from Geek Brief told me the same was true for their line.
So I spent some time this afternoon playing Super Monkey Ball, Band, and trying out some of the other apps. Super Monkey Ball looks great and runs smoothly. It is a tough game because of the way you control movement. As a gamer, I’m not so sure I like the idea of the challenge being in how you can control movement. I prefer strategy or reaction time.
Band is interesting, but I got bored with it quickly. It may be more fun if there are a few people who have it and you can “jam.” Or, it may grow to be an excellent app once more instruments are added and perhaps there is a better system for saving and editing music. I’d love to see a desktop version so you could start composing on your iPhone and then polish it off on your Mac later on.
By far, the app I like the best is Pandora. Pandora is the Web site/service that plays music it thinks you will like based on feedback. I’ve been a user for a while, and I love the commercial-free “make your own radio station” idea. Now that it works on the iPhone, oh boy. That’s the end of radio for me. I even tried it in the car on the drive home and it played song after song over the Edge network without missing a beat.
I was a little please and also disappointed in AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). This is basically iChat for the iPhone, as you can use your AIM account or your .Mac (MobileMe) account. It just seemed very buggy. And I used an AIM account at first, and the only way I could figure to switch to my .Mac account was to delete the App and re-install. Likewise, Twitterrific seemed unfinished. I can’t seem to get it to display the most recent tweets when I start the App. It is still easier just to go to Twitter.com on the iPhone and get what I want faster.
Looking through the App Store, I saw a lot of junk. There were Apps for $1 that really didn’t do much. There were others, like the FaceBook App that did LESS than the equivalent iPhone-formatted Web site. So what’s the point?
Breaking news: once you have downloaded iTunes 7.7, which is available via software update, click on this special link in Safari and iTunes should launch and take you right to the app page for the iPhone Remote application. You can even download it, though I guess we will have to wait for iPhone 2.0 software to install it.
You can then use the navigation at the top to go to other sections of the App Store.
1. Headphone jack. The new iPhone will have a flush headphone jack. This means you can plug in any standard headphone or speaker device without a $10 adapter. You know, the adapter you discover you left at home just after you get to the airport.
2. 3G. Well, this is a given. You should get twice the download speed on Web pages, videos and email.
3. GPS. Now you will really know where you are. But I can’t wait for the 3rd party apps that will be built around this. I’m sure it will rival expensive GPS devices in functionality before long. Geocaching may go mainstream.
4. Better battery life. I expected battery life to suffer with 3G, but it looks like we’ll have more battery life than every before.
5. Lots of countries: Friends in Canada and Australia will finally be able to get one, as well as lots of other countries.
6. A scientific calculator in iPhone 2.0, which means there will be no more reason to have a piece of hardware called a “scientific calculator.”
7. Lots of free iPhone apps. I predict that a majority of iPhone apps will be free, cool gizmos created by hobbyists. Something new to discover every week, most likely.
8. Bulk delete for email. Sounds silly, but this eats up a lot of my time.
9. MLB.com live game updates. This is one of the primary things I use my iPhone for right now, via Safari. A dedicated app would be great, as long as there isn’t a subscription fee attached.
10. The price. For $199, a lot of people will start coming over to the iPhone.
